books

This project does a really sweet job of capturing those intimate experiences people have with books, those lasting impressions that you carry around for the rest of your life, when you finish the last page and you whisper, “No one talk to me for a while.”

It’s called Call Me Ishmael, and it essentially involves people leaving voicemails about a book they love and a story they’ve lived. Then they (s/he?) transcribe it and it’s just all the sweetness. Here’s one about The Fault In Our Stars:

I really like Stephen Colbert this week. (Well, more than I usually do.) Most people don’t care about what’s happening between Amazon and Hachette (which is understandable, but unfortunate!), but when Colbert goes to bat… well, demons run when a good man goes to war. You can read all about his war against Amazon here, which is the latest development in the ongoing kerfuffle between the mega online bookseller and book publisher Hachette. The stakes? The future of a great publisher, the livelihood of everyone who works in the book industry, including authors, and, ultimately, readers like you.

The sticker Stephen Colbert wants you to download from The Colbert Report website (http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/) and put on things you don’t buy from Amazon.

There are valid points on both sides of the issue (after all, low low prices on Amazon get people buying books, but they don’t really support the publishing industry in the process of providing great books in the first place), but I’ll just say that I think Amazon could benefit from understanding how much work and money goes into creating books, and how valuable publishers (and editors and agents, etc. etc. etc.) are to that process.

Sorry, I may have jumped ahead. I’m talking about BookCon, which you can read all about in this Vulture article. TL;DR: It’s a new-ish (they’ve been doing something similar for the last two years under a different name) part of Book Expo America (BEA), one of the biggest book trade fairs in the world, which is happening this weekend in NYC. While the multi-day fair is pretty much for industry types looking to buy and sell publishing rights, they’ve set aside one day for a public festival, organized by ReedPop, a more consumer-savvy and pop culture-oriented subsidiary of the BEA’s organizer, Reed. Book fans can pay $30 to interact with authors in a way that they hope is like those rabid fan conventions with Spock ears and overnight lineups. So far, 8,000 tickets have been sold, which is a long way from the ~150,000 attendees San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC) gets.

The article goes into some detail about challenges and issues (e.g. lack of diversity among the panelists, the lack of an actual literary focus in favour of more entertainment and blockbuster-y/commercial books, etc.), but I still think it’s a really neat experiment, and I’m bummed I can’t attend this year (though I’ve added it to my Google calendar for 2015). I understand the need to feature celebs like Neil Patrick Harris and Tina Fey alongside authors like John Green and Veronica Roth, though I hope that as the festival expands (if it does), they can offer room to lower profile, but equally awesome, authors. It’s super early, though, and no one really knows what form it’s going to take yet. (Publishers aren’t even sure if they’re going to sell books there or not!)

As a two-time SDCC attendee and a book nerd, I’m just so tickled pink to see things like “Literary quiz shows” on the docket and a policy about bringing weapons (as in, don’t) to the con, including “sharpened metal-bladed weapons (including axes, daggers, hatches, knives, kunai, shuriken, swords, sword canes and switch blades).” Oh gosh, I really hope book cosplay takes off.

If you’re a YouTube star with a robust fan base, you just got one step closer to publishing a book.

This NYTimes article from yesterday is all about a new imprint called Keywords Press — a joint venture between Simon & Schuster’s Atria Publishing Group and the Hollywood United Talent Agency — that wants to publish books by YouTube entertainers.

Judith Curr, the president and publisher of Atria, says signing YouTube celebrities “gives us access to a whole new talent pool.” Credit Nancy Borowick for The New York Times

There is precedence for YouTube stars to publish books, and it is common practice for book publishers to mine for manuscripts from well-known individuals with built-in followings, but it’s really interesting to see a whole imprint dedicated to the gambit and to even tweak their publishing models to follow YouTube-like practices; most of these books will be crowdsourced, and they’ll be shot out into the marketplace faster than other books.

In the article, iJustine (one of five YouTube stars who have already signed deals with Keywords) says, “I’ve always wanted to write a book, but the proposal process is kind of crazy [….] I would say, ‘Why can’t I just do it?’ That’s what we are used to doing online.'”

I just hope these YouTubers are also good writers. Having a talent for making videos and a ready-made audience is great, but there’s something to be said for having the chops to write well, too. Being sellable shouldn’t be the only prerequisite to getting published. I also hope there’s still room in the publishing industry for all the aspiring authors who haven’t had time to build their own customer bases because they were, you know, busy learning how to write a good book.